Early December 2013: Catching up, again

It's hard to believe that it is already early December.  This year has really sped past!

I've been doing a ton of artsy stuff, and need to have a really long post to show you some of what I've been doing.

This last month, I took a great class from Jody Ohl called "Texturize This!"  Jodi is a great teacher and her video tutorials are in-depth and very friendly.  She has a very distinct, fresh painting style that is great fun and not in the least fussy or rule-ridden.  No rules???  That's right up my alley.

We had a number of exercise pieces to do during the class.  The first was to create an landscape of three colors.  Here is the first layer:

Exercise 1: First Layer of three color landscape

 And here is the final version:

Final Version:  Forest Sunset

Then, we had to do a second landscape, again using just two or three colors, and use alcohol and a heat gun to distress the paint.  Here is my draft:

Draft:  river landscape

And here is the final version:

Final Version:  River Running

I like the way the bubbles produced by the heat gun look like trees or brush in the final version.

Next up, a two-color landscape that was to be water and heat gun distressed:

Draft:  Exercise 3

And, here is the final version:

Final Version:  Desert Starlight

For the fourth exercise, we were to use stencils and white acrylic paint to add texture to the claybord, as a resist for color.  Then, add color and wipe it back to reveal the stenciled designs.  I have not yet completed the final version, but it won't be much different.

Draft:  Exercise 4

Our next exercise was to carve a simple design into the claybord and flood the carved areas with black India ink.   My arthritic fingers refused to work when I used the Speedball carving tool, so I slapped the engraving tip onto my little Dremel tool and went to work.  It was a great idea!  Then we were to wipe the black off the surface, leaving only the ink in the grooves.  This was really messy and I got ink everywhere.  And my enthusiastic wiping back removed ink from some of the grooved areas as well.  As I was reluctant to do that messy business all over again, I decided to use my dip pin to add ink to the grooves.   Clearly the biggest part of this exercise was to improvise...

Then, I added paint.  That was easy enough.  I used the heat gun again, this time to add bubbly, rough texture to the center of the flower.  And here is the completed piece:

Final Version:  Sun-flower

That's it for this post ... I need to take more pictures!